Atom-Smasher Gears Up to Find 'God Particle'

Data from these collisions will then be sifted by a massive computer farm above ground, which will send the most promising events on "The Grid," a miniature World Wide Web.

The Grid comprises 11 institutions around the world that specialize in high-energy physics, which in turn will hand on the information to physics departments in universities.

Each partner has agreed to give up space on its computers to store and pool data and analyses, which thus opens up an unprecedented global computational resource.

A quiet dread felt by all the researchers at CERN is that a team in Chicago, working at the legendary Fermilab, might grab the elusive Higgs first, using an ageing accelerator, the Tevatron, which is due to be phased out in 2010.

"It will take us a year to get the whole thing [the LHC] working," cautions Schukraft.

Even so, the competition is fierce but not cut-throat.

The United States -- and Fermilab itself -- are enthusiastic partners in the LHC, and in the small world of particle physics, everyone knows everyone else and friendships run deep, cutting across borders, ethnicities and nationalisms.

"At CERN, everything co-exists here, the very big and the very small. The Pakistanis work alongside Indians and Palestinians alongside Israelis. Physics is one throughout the world," noted Denegri.

Related Links:

Irene Klotz's blog: Free Space

The Large Hadron Collider

How Stuff Works: How the Large Hadron Collider Works

Fermilab